I’ve recently learned that famous nature micro-photographer Piotr Naskrecki observed an aquatic anole catching prey underwater. Here’s what he had to say on his blog, The Smaller Majority:

The other aquatic iguana

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Above: Albert Chung presented on how testosterone influences sexual signals and energetics at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in New Orleans, LA.

Many researchers are curious about how sexual signals evolve and if those signals are influenced by an individual’s energetics. Signal expression (such as anole dewlap size or color) and energetics might have the same physiological underpinnings, and signal expression may be limited by energetic state. Albert Chung, a graduate student working with Dr. Christian Cox at Georgia Southern University, along with graduate student, Aaron Reedy, and Dr. Robert Cox at the University of Virginia tested this hypothesis with brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) in the lab and in a wild population in the Bahamas.

The researchers had three different groups in this experiment. In one group, the males were castrated, so they wouldn’t produce natural testosterone. These males were each given a small implant that released synthetic testosterone designed to have the same effects on the body as natural testosterone. In the next group, males went through a procedure to mimic castration, but were effectively left intact, and implanted with an empty implant. These males still produced natural testosterone. In the final group, males were castrated and each one was given an empty implant, so they did not have testosterone in their bodies.

Wild anoles were recaptured after two months. The researchers measured the size and color of the dewlap, how much fat was stored (which provided the researchers with an estimate of energetic state), and body condition. They took the same measurements in the lab population.

There were clear differences between the males that had testosterone (both natural and synthetic) and males that did not have testosterone. Castrated males had smaller dewlaps compared to intact males and testosterone-treated males in both the field and lab populations. Dewlap size of testosterone-treated males was similar to that of intact males in the wild population, but in the lab population, testosterone-treated males had larger dewlaps than intact males.

Castrated males in the wild population had brighter, more saturated dewlap coloration than testosterone-treated males and intact males. In the lab population, dewlap coloration did not differ among the treatments.

In the wild population, castrated males had higher body fat mass than intact males and testosterone-treated males. Wild testosterone-treated males were similar in body fat to intact males. Castrated males in the lab population also had higher body fat mass than intact males and testosterone-treated males.

The researchers also looked to see if either fat mass or body condition were correlated with dewlap size or color within each treatment group. None of these variables were correlated with one another.

Overall, while dewlap expression was not dependent on an individual’s energetic state, both energetics and dewlap expression were directly influenced by a common hormone: testosterone.

Jeanel Georges with her poster at SICB.

The beautiful island of Dominica used to be home to only one anole (Anolis oculatus), but about 20 years ago, the Puerto Rican crested anole (Anolis cristatellus) showed up. Jeanel Georges, a graduate student in Matt Watson’s lab at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas who is originally from Dominica, noticed that while A. oculatus occurs in all the ecological zones of the island, A. cristatellus is absent from the cooler, wetter uplands. With an international group of collaborators, Jeanel examined the thermal habitat use, sprint speed, and bite force of both species to determine what may limit the spread of A. cristatellus across the island.

At a lowland site where the two species co-occur, both species had higher body temperatures that the operative temperatures randomly available in the environment. In the much cooler upland site, A. oculatus had much higher body temperatures than the operative models, but these body temperatures were cooler than that species experiences in the lowland site. Jeanel also found that the two species had stronger bite forces and higher sprint speeds in the lowland site than A. oculatus had in the upland site. These data suggest that A. cristatellus and A. oculatus are partitioning the thermal environment of Dominica, and as climate change alters the temperatures available to lizards on the island, the interactions between these two species may change.

Austin Hulbert with his poster at SICB 2017.

This post was written by Brittney Ivanov, research technician in Michele Johnson’s lab at Trinity University.

Austin Hulbert, an undergraduate in Dan Warner’s lab at Auburn University, presented a poster on the behavior of brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) in a novel environment: a few very hot greenhouses in Auburn, Alabama. Brown anoles are an invasive species, most notably in Florida, but some populations have been found farther north in states including Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. As ectotherms migrate to higher latitudes, they often have to deal with different thermal environments and must alter their behaviors accordingly. Austin was interested in determining the activity patterns of a population of brown anoles inhabiting a group of greenhouses in Alabama.

During the summer he found that temperatures inside the greenhouses were consistently higher than those outside. Temperatures drastically increased each morning, up to peak temperatures between 11am and 3pm (on average, 45°C inside the greenhouse and 37°C outside). In the evenings, the temperatures again cooled. Austin surveyed the greenhouses and the surrounding areas for anoles during the morning, peak, and evening hours and determined the type of substrate each individual was using (i.e. brick or concrete, ground, metal, or wood). On average, brown anoles were more abundant inside the greenhouses than outside during the morning and peak times. He also found that more of the brown anoles perched on wooden substrate in the morning and evening. During peak hours more lizards perched on the ground. Because temperatures are often cooler closer to the ground, the lizards may be altering their behavior to deal with the extreme heat in the greenhouses during the hottest part of the day. While the visual survey focused on lizards perched in the open areas visible to the surveyor, there may have been individuals hiding under undisturbed objects as a means to keep cool during peak hours. In the future, Austin would like to compare the thermal tolerance of this group of brown anoles to those of populations in Florida to determine if inhabiting these greenhouses has resulted in adaptions to tolerate their more extreme temperatures.

Jerry Husak presenting at SICB 2017.

This post was co-written by Maria Jaramillo, an undergraduate in Michele Johnson’s lab at Trinity University.

A mother’s experience during gravidity may alter her offspring’s development, particularly through altering hormone levels in the yolk of her eggs. Stress hormones such as corticosterone (CORT) alter various aspects of offspring phenotype following in ovo exposure, and physical exercise elevates CORT in many vertebrates. In the work he presented at SICB, Jerry Husak and colleagues used exercise and food restriction to manipulate female Anolis carolinensis CORT, and to then determine whether the increased CORT was transferred to the females’ egg yolks.

Jerry assigned females to one of four treatments with different combinations of exercise and food restriction: 1) no exercise, regular diet; 2) no exercise, restricted diet; 3) exercise, regular diet; and 4) exercise, restricted diet.  He found that maternal exercise increased maternal CORT (as expected), but surprisingly did not result in higher CORT in the eggs. Further, diet restriction did not affect maternal CORT, but moms with restricted diets laid eggs with reduced CORT.

This study suggests that anole mothers may manipulate the environments of their eggs in ways we don’t yet understand – the mechanisms by which CORT is transferred to eggs is an area ripe for future study!

Doctoral candidate Ariel Kahrl presents her research on sperm evolution at SICB 2017.

Every year since 2013, the Division of Ecology and Evolution (DEE) hosts the Huey Award Symposium at the annual SICB meeting. The Huey award is given for the best student presentation in DEE, in honor of Ray Huey, professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Ray’s career featured a lot of key research on anoles, and so there is often good representation by anole biologists at the Huey award. At this year’s symposium, Ariel Kahrl, a graduate student in Bob Cox’s lab at the University of Virginia, presented her research on pre- and postcopulatory selection in Anolis lizards.

We know that male competition for mates occurs both before copulation (mating success) and after copulation (sperm competition). Her research focuses on investigating the evolutionary connection between these two phases of competition. She found that larger males have smaller relative testis size, indicating a tradeoff between pre- and postcopulatory success, as larger males will have better success gaining access to females, but less sperm available for mating.

When she looked at testis and sperm morphology in greater detail, a few interesting patterns emerged. First, she found that testis size evolves faster than body size, consistent with other studies showing that reproductive organs evolve faster than other body traits. She also found that the midpiece section evolved faster than the head and the tail of the sperm. Importantly, the midpiece section of the sperm was strongly associated with male condition and sperm swimming speed, whereas the head and tail of the sperm were not associated with male  condition or sperm swimming performance. She further hypothesized that sperm count may be a more important target of selection than sperm morphology.

The effects of climate change and urbanization on reptiles and amphibians has been a major topic at this year’s SICB. Both are expected to cause drastic changes in the climate, which will likely be severely detrimental to many species. We hope that many species will be able to tolerate these changes by adapting or acclimating, either by thermoregulating or changing their physiology. Adults of many species are able to acclimate in this way, but Josh Hall of the Warner lab wanted to test if eggs (which are unable to move to thermoregulate) are able to acclimate their physiology in response to higher average temperatures and to spikes in temperature that you might find in urban environments. Josh collected two populations of wild A. cristatellus from Miami, an urban population and a forest population, brought them back to the lab, and collected their eggs.

Josh Hall’s design, with 5 temperature regimes. City=light blue, Forest=green.

He then put the eggs into five different thermal conditions 1) higher “urban” temperatures, 2) cooler “forest” temperatures, 3) “urban” temperature with a large temperature spike on day 8, 4) “forest” temperature with a large spike on day 10, and 5) “forest” temperature with a small spike on day 10. He predicted that eggs that had a higher baseline temp (i.e. the urban eggs), would be able to tolerate spikes in temperature better than eggs at lower temperatures and would have higher survival and less of a physiological stress response due to the temperature spike. Contrary to his hypothesis, he found that high temperatures, and spikes were both detrimental to the survival of eggs and hatchlings, and affected baseline and max heart rate in embryos. This is somewhat concerning because it suggests that even a single short burst of heat can kill embryos, and have lasting affects on juveniles. The bursts, which you might expect in urban areas, have a more profound affect when the background temperature is higher, which will likely happen due to climate change.

Effects of incubation treatments on embryonic heartbeat, egg and juvenile survival.

Image from Miguel Webber.

Frequent readers of Anole Annals are likely to recall the amazing convergent evolution of morphology related to habitat use in Caribbean anoles that coincides with similarly striking convergent evolution of social behavior. Most of what we know about behavior of Caribbean anoles is how males behave: there are major differences among ecomorphs in how often males use their colorful dewlaps and how often they mate with females. Such male-typical behavior seems intuitively linked to species differences in testosterone signaling. Previous work has shown, though, that these differences do not seem to be related to levels of testosterone in the blood, so Miguel Webber of Michele Johnson’s lab at Trinity University examined whether the receptors for testosterone varies in a manner consistent with the behavior for six Dominican Republic species of anoles and one U.S. species.

Hormones can only cause effects on tissues that have receptors for them, so Miguel looked at receptors for testosterone (androgen receptors) in the muscles responsible for moving those fabulous dewlaps (the ceratohyoid muscle), expecting to find a correlation across species between the number of androgen receptors in the muscle and the rate of dewlap extensions. Although the data are still preliminary, there was a trend for males with higher dewlap extension rates to have more androgen receptors in the ceratohyoid muscle. His next steps are to look for an association between rates of copulation and androgen receptors in the muscle used by males to copulate (retractor penis magnus muscle – yes, it does what you would guess based on the name…). He also wants to see if there is a correlation among species in the behavioral traits and androgen receptors in regions of the brain that are important for social behavior regulation.